Semantic Web Standards Evolve

Semantic search, semantic Web… As of late, we’ve noticed the spiking interest in this branch of linguistics as it applies to the good ole Web.

What’s next — semantic blogging? Nah, not just yet. For now, the industry is moving to standardize some of the semantics and logistics of the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language.

The father of the WWW,Tim Berners-Lee, originally expressed the vision of the semantic Web as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

While it all sounds very Martin Luther King meets Men in Black, it looks like Berners-Lee’s dreams are coming true, and the industry is even putting a bureaucracy spin on the whole semantic Web by making it oh-so-pretty and standard for all to enjoy in a uniformed way. Just like in conformation dog shows, only the most handsome and best-structured ones win.